[MPICH] wmpiconfig error on windows mpich2-1.0.2: MPICH2 not installed or unable to query the host

[Aaron Darling]

Hi David,
Thanks for the reply.
We successfully got mpich2 communicating within the domain after 
upgrading all hosts to version 1.0.2-1.  We set a Windows group policy 
object for our host firewalls to allow the program "smpd.exe" instead of 
the specific port 8676, so I think we must have avoided the problem of 
the second port being blocked without ever knowing about it.  As for the 
cross-domain use of wmpiconfig, e.g. from a domain member to a 
non-domain member, we never solved that problem.  I'm travelling at the 
moment, but when I return in two weeks I will further test whether we 
were having firewall problems or domain authentication problems...

Thanks again
-Aaron

David Ashton wrote:

>Aaron,
>
>I suspect the problem is with your firewall.  The way smpd works is that the
>client connects to port 8676 and then another smpd.exe is launched in the
>context of the client user.  The client then re-connects to this new smpd
>process on another port.  Your firewall is probably blocking the second
>connection attempt.  The easy solution to this is to not use a TCP firewall.
>
>You will run into problems running an MPI application if you only allow
>access to port 8676 and use the default socket channel.  Each MPI process
>selects an OS determined port to listen on and these will be blocked by your
>firewall.
>
>You can restrict the ports that MPI applications use by specifying the
>environment variable MPICH_PORT_RANGE=minport,maxport.  This will work for
>smpd also but you will have to get the variable specified before the smpd
>service is started by the system.  This probably can be done by setting
>MPICH_PORT_RANGE in the system environment variables (make sure the range
>includes 8676).
>
>"smpd.exe -status host" is working for you because this mechanism does not
>spawn a second smpd process and only needs access to port 8676.
>
>-David Ashton
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
>[mailto:owner-mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of Aaron Darling
>Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 12:20 PM
>To: mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
>Cc: Paul Liss
>Subject: [MPICH] wmpiconfig error on windows mpich2-1.0.2: MPICH2 not
>installed or unable to query the host
>
>Hi All,
>I'm attempting to configure mpich2 on a group of windows machines.  We
>have automatically deployed the mpich2 msi on several of the machines,
>while on two of the machines we manually installed mpich2-1.0.2 so that
>we could have the GUI components which deployed installations lack.
>
>After deploying, we updated our firewall policies to enable access to
>smpd.exe on port 8676 and running `telnet geb 8676` spits out something
>like this to the screen:
>C:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin>telnet geb 8676
>1.0.2 19169
>which I take as being able to successfully connect to the remote smpd.
>
>I'm now trying to use wmpiconfig to configure the daemons.  When I
>attempt to read the configuration from the remote host I get the
>following message:
>GEB: MPICH2 not installed or unable to query the host
>
>However, smpd seems to think it's running on geb:
>
>C:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin>smpd -status geb
>smpd running on geb
>
>geb is one of the machines on which mpich2-1.0.2-1 was manually
>installed with GUI components.
>
>If I connect to one of the machines that was automatically deployed
>using mpich-1.0.1 I see:
>
>C:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin>telnet khufu 8676
>5436
>
>but no version number.  Connecting using smpd -status fails:
>
>C:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin>smpd -status khufu
>Aborting: unable to connect to khufu
>
>OK, so different versions of mpich won't talk to each other.  I can live
>with that.
>
>Why won't wmpiconfig work on my two manually installed mpich2-1.0.2-1 hosts?
>Is it a problem that they are in different windows domains even though
>they are on the same /24 subnet?
>
>Can anybody give me a clue as to how I can debug the problem or what may
>be wrong?
>
>Thanks in advance for your help, hopefully I'm missing something obvious
>to you guys!
>
>-Aaron
>
>
>  
>